The Last-Minute Change You Can Still Make to Get an Ecommerce Edge Through the Holidays

By this time of year, most enterprise holiday strategies are more or less settled. Your media budget is locked in, your pricing strategy is nearly finalized, your main digital marketing campaigns for most of the rest of the year are wrapped.

There’s still plenty to do, and strong execution will be essential to bringing it all together, and for many organizations there’s a sense of waiting and hope for the best.

But there’s still one more big lever brands can pull to get an edge through the rest of the year: product content. Making the most of this tool could mean the difference between a good holiday and a great one.

Why Product Content Optimization Is an Evergreen Strategy

Two main traits make product content optimization a viable strategy to drive incremental results throughout the busy holiday season.

First, it works. According to new findings from The State of Product Content 2023, product data, information, and multimedia have a material impact on conversions and revenue.  Eighty-nine percent of consumers will leave a site or page if they’re not quickly able to find the information they want.

The research also revealed that four out of ten shoppers have abandoned a potential purchase because they couldn’t find sufficient information about the product they were considering.

The second main trait of content optimization is that you can improve, update, and adjust product content on the fly with comparative ease, unlike many other major holiday initiatives. You don’t need to secure a big new budget, wait for your agency to develop a new campaign, or rely on IT to build a new program or experience. This is something that can be done even in the heart of the holidays with relative independence and agility.

Want to learn how to make Product Detail Pages that stand out? Download The State of Product Content 2023 to discover what content your shoppers look for most.

Syndication: The Key to Unlocking Holiday Content Agility

The key to a dynamic product data strategy through the holidays is robust syndication.

Swift delivery of data to your retail partners is essential for getting the most value from it. If it takes weeks to adjust a product description or swap out an image with seasonal packaging, you’ll be playing catch up instead of getting ahead of the competition.

And as retailers put more and more priority on customer experience and differentiating their ecommerce platforms from the competition, they’ve gotten more discerning about the content they accept and publish. They want to make sure information and assets are accurate, appealing, and deliver a consistent experience across their sites.

That’s why it’s important to have a syndication partner that’s trusted by retailers to deliver high-quality data in the appropriate format.

This increases your agility, so you can adapt content on the fly to respond to shifting needs. If, for instance, you wanted to trade out a Black Friday-themed video or image for a Cyber Monday alternative a couple days later, it would require a strong, direct connection to the retailer supported by confidence that the data will arrive in the right format and be ready to thrive that ecommerce environment. In Syndigo’s near real-time environment, this becomes a possibility.

How Syndigo’s Data Shortcut Gets Data Live at Kroger in Hours Instead of Weeks

Syndigo’s unmatched network of 1750+ retailers, distributors, and marketplaces makes it the most reliable way to distribute product content and get it published as fast as possible wherever it needs to be through the holiday season.

Ensure Consistency with Your Seasonal Assortments

Brands often introduce a variety of new products throughout the holiday season or introduce new themed styles and packaging to their catalogs.

This can make them stand out on shelves, but also introduces potential for confusion and conflicting information if products appear differently between store shelves, promotional materials, and online Product Detail Pages. Data show that at least 22% of customers have recently noticed inconsistent representations of one or more products, and it’s likely that figure will rise during the busy holiday season.

A combination of PIM (Product Information Management), which organizes content and generates a ‘golden record’ for all products, with analytics to keep an eye on your PDPs and ensure they reflect your most up-to-date content, is the best way to ensure consistency and deliver a great experience. Learn more about managing and optimizing seasonal product content in this blog.

Mitigate Holiday Returns

The National Retail Federation estimates about 18% of products purchased during last year’s holiday season were ultimately returned—a painful blow to those critical Q4 revenue numbers and an enormously expensive and complicated logistical challenge for retailers and manufacturers alike.

Some of this number is inevitable, but a significant portion is avoidable. According to the survey, 32% of consumers recently returned a product because it did not meet expectations set by the information they had available when they bought it.

Higher quality content that completely and accurately describes your products’ benefits, features and capabilities leads to more satisfied shoppers and fewer returns. Click here to learn more about combining analytics with content to cool down your return rate through the holidays.

Get The Insights You Need to Succeed Through the Holidays

Consumer preferences are changing fast… Are you keeping up? Find out what your customers think about your content, and what you could be doing to reach them better, in The State of Product Content 2023.